Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

It was said coldly, an accomplished fact; and yet also a strange mixture of threat and concern. At the same time as his argument carried Bray with him, the presence of Bray brought out in him an old responsibility for Mweta.

“I don’t agree he’s done as badly as you think. But the general direction—”

Shinza was watching him, fishing a cigarette out of the sagging breast pocket of the holiday shirt made of Japanese cotton, and the recognition of the admittance he had drawn from Bray — now appearing — grew beneath the control of his face as Bray was speaking.

“—The way he’s going, I’m inclined to agree about that.” Bray made a gesture of impatient self — dismissal. “I’m sure it’s not the way it should be. If you and he meant everything — then. I must judge by what was visualized then. The sort of state you had in mind, that I believed you to have in mind when I”—his voice disowned him, as it always did, fastidiously, when it came to defining his part in a struggle he did not claim his own— “decided to go along with you. It’s true — what you were absolutely clear about was that coming to power wasn’t going to be a matter of multiplying the emancipated, while the rest of the people remained a class of affranchised slaves—” He referred with a smile to the phrases from Fanon. “It’s never been put better.”

“—That’s been forgotten. And something else we got from Fanon: ‘The people must be taught to cry “Stop thief!”’”

“I don’t remember …?”

“Look it up,” said Shinza. “Look it up.”

“It’s a long time since I read him. — I wonder now if you were clear enough in your minds about how to go about getting what we were so sure you wanted. The less simple objectives remained very much in a sort of private debate between you and Mweta—”

“—And you,” Shinza said.

“—A handful of others, not even a handful. It couldn’t be helped. Everything was hell — bent on the business of organizing PIP purely and simply as a force that would get independence. How many people could be expected to see beyond that. Well it’s an old story, not worth discussion — one of the results of the policy we”—he was suddenly speaking of himself as part of the colonial administration— “had of discouraging political parties until such time as they burst forth as mass movements — and then in due course they could be counted upon to become potentially violent and could be banned in the interests of law and order.… But the effect was to make parties like PIP miss out the vital stage of their function as political schools and ideological debating forums, a means of formulating the blind yearning to have into something that would hold good beyond the”—his hand spiralled through the air— “grand anticlimax of paper freedom. That really wasn’t touched on — a practical means of taking hold not of the old life out of the white man’s hands, but a new kind of life that hasn’t yet been. It just wasn’t touched on. Only among ourselves. And at the back of the minds of even the most intelligent and reasonable people there’s a vague intoxication of loot associated with seeing the end of foreign rule. Loot of one kind or another … it doesn’t have to be smashing shopwindows, you know. Even the imponderables can be loot. ‘We’ll shop around when the time comes.’”

“Maybe.” Shinza made the concession of one who does not agree. “Maybe I should blame myself. I should have seen.”

“What could you have done, with things as they were?”

“I should have seen what he was.”

Bray gave a little snort of a laugh. “I always say the same thing. It always comes round to the same thing. It should have been both of you. It was the two of you. One didn’t know what originated with which one — of course always granting the influence of your trade union experience. One couldn’t foresee how he would develop after a split. Or how you would, for that matter.”

“I’ve always known what we were going to do. Nothing’s changed at all with me. I was just too damned lazy, I suppose … you’ve got to give yourself a kick in the backside sometime.” He put his hands behind his head, smiling, making his words ambiguous by the easy gesture.

“You definitely don’t consider starting a new party?”

Shinza was shaking his head before the words were out. “I’ve told you. PIP is this country — just as he says, PIP made it. Everything must come from PIP. He would like a purified party, of course, degutted like the bloody fishing concession. PIP is the party I started.”

“It was meant as a leading question,” Bray said.

“I don’t hide from you. You see it all exactly as I do, you haven’t changed either, it’s just you’ve got the same polite nice way of speaking you always had, really nice, covering it up … James! But if you had to choose between Mweta and what happens to this country — Good God!”

“He said more or less the same to me.” It was dryly, gently set aside; he smiled.

“With one essential difference, of course, whatever he decides for this country must be right.” Shinza stretched his toes like fingers and clenched the leather button that held each sandal.

“No, no — just the implication that I would do what is usually known as ‘anything’—in other words, something that went against my grain — because it might help.” Still the old maid, setting the mats straight, he thought.

“Help? What?” said Shinza. “To hold the country together almost exactly as it was before? To keep the sort of status quo the Europeans call stability — the stability of overseas investment, the stability of being so poor your feast comes once a year when the caterpillars hatch on the mopane? But we want an instability, James, we want an instability in the poverty and backwardness of this country, we want the people at the top to be a bit poorer for a few years now, so that the real, traditional, rock — bottom poverty, the good old kind that ‘never changes’ in Africa, can be broken up out of its famous stability at last, at long, long last, dragged up from the shit—”

How demandingly, alive, they both reached out — he and Mweta. Bray said, “I must tell you, he may have some idea about your going over the border. He mentioned something — before I came to see you again. I didn’t take much notice at the time.”

“Borders! Doesn’t mean anything in the Bashi,” Shinza said. “People are wandering over after their goats, every day. You forget we’re the same people on both sides.”

“If I can imagine what you’re doing there, it’s reasonable that he may.”

Shinza was drawing and swallowing smoke with absent appetite. Once a cigarette was lit it remained in the side of his mouth until it burned down to his lips.

Bray said, “What’s it all about — Somshetsi and Nyanza?”

“The usual thing, in exile.” The glance held, direct, as if to prevent Bray’s mind from venturing off this chosen interpretation of the question. “They haven’t been getting on too well.… Nyanza’s always been a pretty easy — going chap, sitting back and waiting for the fruit to fall. When Mweta said go, he just went straight to Somshetsi”—he jerked his bearded chin—” ‘pack up’; never occurred to him to make a bit of fuss, to let a few friends know.… I mean they could have played for time, there could have been denials, protests to the High Commissioner for refugees at U.N. —”

They grinned. “Considering the way they were scrupulously observing the conditions of hospitality,” Bray said; and waved his own provision aside.

Shinza said matter — of-factly, “Well, that’s about it. Somshetsi thinks Nyanza will just make himself comfortable wherever he gets pushed off to next. Somshetsi wants to get going. He doesn’t see himself dying in bed with the grandchildren round. Of course there’s help to be found if you show you’re moving.”